Chapter 28
What the dark experiences mean — and what they don’t mean
In 1962, in a hospital delivery room, a young mother named Nancy Evans Bush was given a dose of a drug then commonly used in obstetrics. Almost at once, she heard a series of clicks. The clicks pulled her somewhere. She found herself in a vast, gray nothingness, in the company of small forms she could not quite see, and she was told — by something or someone she could not name — that her life had been a kind of cosmic joke. She had never really mattered. She was now being absorbed into the nothing where she had always belonged. Her child was a joke. Her husband was a joke. The world was a joke. She would not exist again.1
She came back. She told no one for almost thirty years. She was a Christian. She loved her family. She lived with the experience like a stone she could not put down. Eventually she found her way to the early researchers in this field and what she discovered was that she was not alone. Others had gone into the dark. Some had seen things even worse. Some, like her, had simply met the void.
Today Nancy Evans Bush is the most important pastoral voice in the world for people who have had distressing near-death experiences. With Bruce Greyson, she co-authored the 1992 paper that established the typology we still use.2 Her 2012 book Dancing Past the Dark is the only sustained pastoral-theological treatment of the subject by someone who has both lived through it and studied it for fifty years.3 When I read her book, I read it as a researcher. When I closed it, I closed it as a pastor.
This chapter is about the dark NDEs. The ones that frighten readers and trouble theologians. The ones that — depending on whom you ask — either prove or refute the existence of hell.
The popular Christian use of NDE literature has a problem. The encouraging cases get told in sermons. The dark cases get used as warnings. Between the two, very few people stop to ask the harder question: what are these experiences, really, and what should we do with them theologically?
I want to be careful here. Distressing NDEs are not a theological embarrassment to be hidden. They are also not a tract-rack proof of eternal conscious torment. They are real reports from real people about something that happened to them at the boundary of death. Some of those reports are profoundly disturbing. A few are, by any honest reading, hellish. But what they mean is a different question from what they are — and this chapter is about both.
I write as a substance dualist (developed at length in Chapter 23) who holds conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, with genuine openness to a conservative biblical universalism. I do not hold to eternal conscious torment. So when I say that distressing NDEs are theologically significant, I am not saying they support the doctrine I do not hold. I am saying something more subtle. They are real. They tell us something. And what they tell us turns out to be compatible with several readings of the biblical witness — but not with cheap dismissal.
In 1992, in the journal Psychiatry, Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush published the paper that is still the best starting point. They had collected fifty distressing NDE accounts. They sorted them into three types. Almost every distressing NDE since reported has fit one of the three.2
The first type they called inverse. An inverse NDE has the same elements as a peaceful one — the sense of leaving the body, the tunnel, the light, the presence — but the experiencer interprets each element with terror rather than peace. The light feels not warm but searing. The presence feels not loving but watchful, judging, even hostile. The reunion feels not like home but like exposure. The phenomenology of inverse cases is structurally identical to the phenomenology of pleasant cases. Only the interpretation diverges.
The second type is the void. This is what Bush herself reported. Eternal nothingness. Featureless gray or featureless black. A sense of having always been alone and always going to be alone. Sometimes a voice or impression delivers a message of meaninglessness. The cosmic joke. The realization that nothing was real. Void NDEs are the rarest of the three but, by the testimony of those who have had them, often the most lasting in their disturbance.
The third is what most people picture when they hear “distressing NDE.” Greyson and Bush called it hellish. Demonic figures. Flames. Pits. Crowds of suffering souls. Sometimes audible torment. Sometimes a sense of being claimed or pulled by something hostile. These are the rarest in the published literature but the most striking when they appear, and they are the cases most often cited from the pulpit.
From the dissertation database, one female subject in her forties reported during cardiac arrest finding herself in a tunnel that grew tighter and darker as she traveled it. Faces appeared in the walls, looking at her without expression. She felt that she was being shown what she had become. She prayed silently. The tunnel widened. A figure of light met her at the end and she was returned. On follow-up six months later she described the experience as “the worst night of my life and the best” — a phrasing typical of the inverse-type with redemptive resolution.
Estimates vary widely, and most readers will see widely different numbers in the popular literature. Greyson and Bush’s original sample was self-selected, so the percentages there cannot be generalized. The honest answer is that we still do not know the true rate.4
What we can say is this. In retrospective studies, where researchers ask NDErs to describe their experiences years after the fact, the distressing rate has often been reported as somewhere between fifteen and twenty-three percent.5 In prospective studies — where patients are interviewed shortly after the medical event — the rate has tended to come in lower, sometimes considerably lower. Bush herself has long suspected that the true number is higher than the public record suggests, because shame and fear keep people from reporting.3 A man who wakes up after a cardiac arrest reporting that he saw heaven gets pastoral attention. A man who wakes up reporting that he saw demons does not always get a hearing.
In my own dissertation dataset of 5,278 cases, the proportion of accounts containing distressing content was lower than the published estimates from retrospective studies — around eight to ten percent of the qualitative subset showed substantial distressing phenomenology, depending on how one classified mixed cases. This is in line with what one would expect from a database that draws heavily on the NDERF and IANDS public archives, where pleasant cases are over-represented because they are more readily volunteered. The true rate is almost certainly somewhere between the high retrospective and low public-archive estimates. What matters is that distressing NDEs are not vanishingly rare. They are not a tiny anomaly. They are a genuine sub-category of the phenomenon.
The most famous distressing NDE in the English-speaking world is Howard Storm’s. Storm was an art professor at Northern Kentucky University, an avowed atheist, traveling in Paris in 1985 when his duodenum perforated. By the time he reached the hospital, he was bleeding internally and badly. He waited many hours for surgery. At some point during that wait, his heart stopped. What followed, by his own later telling, was a hellish-type NDE in the Greyson–Bush sense.6
Storm reports being led from his hospital bed by figures who at first seemed to be helpers. The figures took him into a region of darkness. As they walked, the figures grew angry, then mocking, then violent. He was attacked. He fought back. He understood, somehow, that he had no protection of his own and that he was where he belonged. In his terror, a memory came to him — a song from his childhood about Jesus loving the children — and he cried out to Jesus. The figures recoiled. A point of light appeared and grew. The light turned out to be a Person. The Person knew everything about Storm and loved him anyway. Storm saw his life — the harm he had done, the love he had refused. He was given a choice and he chose to return. He came back, recovered slowly, eventually entered seminary, and is today a United Church of Christ pastor.
The Storm pattern — distressing onset, calling out to Christ, deliverance into a peaceful encounter, conversion — is not unique to Storm. It appears, with variations, in dozens of cases in the literature. Maurice Rawlings reported similar cases in Beyond Death’s Door in 1978; Rawlings’s methodology was poor and many of his specific cases must be handled with care, but the pattern he identified is real and is corroborated by better-documented work since.7 The pattern raises a question that demands a theological answer. If a person can begin in something resembling hell and end in something resembling heaven within a single experience, then whatever distressing NDEs are, they are not simple ratifications of a final destiny.
Here is where careful work begins. There are five serious ways to read distressing NDEs theologically. I will lay them out before saying which one I hold and why.
The strict ECT reading. Distressing NDEs are warnings of a literal, eternal hell. The void is the abyss. The hellish imagery is exactly what it appears to be. The interpretive reading is wishful. The pastoral implication: preach the urgency of the gospel before death.
The interpretive reading. The same encounter appears differently to different souls. The being of light is loving. A soul filled with fear, shame, or rejection experiences love itself as terror. On this reading, distressing and pleasant NDEs are reports of one objective encounter, refracted through the prepared or unprepared state of the experiencer.
The pre-purgatorial reading. Distressing experiences are real but transitional. The soul is being confronted with itself before it is brought before the loving Christ. The patristic-medieval purgatorial tradition reads judgment language this way. The distressing phase is real but it is not the end.
The CI reading. Some souls do persist in rejection. The distressing experience is the empirical correlate of that trajectory. Final destruction comes not as a divine sentence imposed against the soul’s will but as the natural end of a soul that has refused the only ground of its being. This is the reading I hold.
The UR reading. Even the distressing experience is part of an eventually purifying process. Love finally proves irresistible. All are at last brought home, however long the road. Thomas Talbott in The Inescapable Love of God develops this reading with great theological care, arguing that biblical “eschatological punishment” language describes purifying rather than retributive suffering.8
Notice what these readings have in common. Four of the five — the interpretive, pre-purgatorial, CI, and UR readings — agree that distressing NDEs are not pictures of an eternal state of suffering. They differ over whether the unsaved are eventually destroyed, eventually saved, or eventually purified. They agree, against the strict ECT reading, that the distress is real and the destiny is not yet fixed in the experience itself.
The strict ECT reading is the most popular reading from American evangelical pulpits, and it is also, in my judgment, the weakest one as an inference from the data. Three reasons.
First, every distressing NDE in the literature ended. The experiencer came back. We do not know whether the dark phase was a destination or a station. We have only data on the first portion of postmortem consciousness, and we have it only from those who returned (see Chapter 22). To read “temporary distressing experience” as evidence for “eternal conscious torment” is to draw a long inference from very limited data.
Second, the rescue pattern is well-attested. If hell were simply where the unsaved go and where they remain, we would not see Howard Storm’s case at all. A soul in hell, on the strict reading, cannot pray to Jesus and be answered. But that is exactly what happens in case after case. The strict reading must explain these cases away as not really hell, or not really NDEs. Neither explanation is satisfying.
Third, the biblical descriptions of judgment, taken whole, include both restoration and destruction language. The fire that consumes (see Chapter 25 and the dissertation Appendix B). The outer darkness. The destruction of body and soul in Gehenna. The lake of fire. The reconciliation of all things in Christ. Distressing NDEs do not by themselves settle which strand of biblical language is dominant. They are consistent with several careful readings of Scripture, including the CI and UR readings I find most plausible. They do not require, and they do not prove, the strict ECT reading.9
“If you are a Christian, you should preach distressing NDEs as pictures of eternal hell. Anything else is softening the gospel.”
The objection assumes what it must show — that the distressing experience the NDEr reports is eternal hell rather than a real but bounded encounter. The data do not support that assumption. Every reported distressing NDE ended. Many ended in rescue. The honest pastoral move is not to flatten the data into the doctrine one prefers but to read the data carefully and let it speak. The gospel is not weakened by careful reading. It is weakened by exaggeration that the dying eventually see through.
The theological account of distressing NDEs that has done the most to clarify my own thinking is R. Zachary Manis’s Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God (Oxford, 2019). Manis develops what he calls the Divine Presence Model of hell. The model is not original to him — versions of it appear in Eastern Orthodox theology, in C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, in David Bentley Hart, in the patristic image of God as a consuming fire — but Manis works it out with rare philosophical precision.10
The Divine Presence Model holds that hell is not a separate place where God is absent. It is the experience of God’s presence by a soul that is unprepared or unwilling to receive Him. The same fire that warms the prepared soul scorches the unprepared. The same light that the saved soul welcomes as Father is met by the resisting soul as wrath. There are not two encounters. There is one encounter, refracted through the disposition of the soul that meets it.
I find this framework compelling because it explains the empirical pattern of distressing-versus-peaceful NDEs better than the older two-place model can. On a two-place model, we have to ask why some NDErs find themselves in heaven and others in hell, and the answers are usually weakly grounded — the saved go up, the unsaved go down — and run into the rescue cases as exceptions. On the Divine Presence Model, the puzzle dissolves. The same Person meets every soul. The terror or the joy is in the meeting, not in the geography.
I want to be clear, however, about what I take from Manis and what I do not. Manis develops his model within an eternal-conscious-torment framework. He argues that the divine presence is experienced as torment everlastingly by those who refuse it, and he defends this view at length. I do not follow him there. The phenomenology Manis describes is, I think, precisely correct. The eternity claim is a separate move that the phenomenology does not require. The same model can be paired with conditional immortality (the soul refusing the divine presence eventually ceases to exist), with postmortem opportunity (the encounter is repeated until the soul is brought home or the soul finally rejects), or with universalism (the divine presence eventually purifies all). The phenomenology is one thing. The eschatology is another.
The Divine Presence Model gives the best phenomenological account of distressing NDEs without requiring the strict ECT framework. One Person — Christ — meets every soul at death. The encounter is met as homecoming by the prepared soul and as terror by the unprepared. Whether the unprepared soul is eventually purified, eventually destroyed, or eternally separated is a separate question that the NDE data alone cannot settle. What the data do show is that the encounter is real, the response is not predetermined, and the trajectory is not yet fixed in the experience the NDEr reports.
Two further frameworks deserve a hearing alongside Manis. Sharon L. Baker’s Razing Hell (Westminster John Knox, 2010) reframes hell within a broader move from retributive to restorative justice. Baker argues that the “fire” of judgment is the very presence of God, and that the experience of standing in that fire is purgative for those who can be purified and consuming for those who cannot.11 Manis himself reads Baker as a hybrid of his Divine Presence Model and a form of annihilationism, and that reading seems right. Baker preserves human freedom — some may finally refuse and be annihilated — while holding that the divine fire is restorative wherever it can be.
Thomas Talbott’s The Inescapable Love of God (Cascade, 2nd ed., 2014), Chapter 6, develops the strongest contemporary universalist reading of distressing-NDE-type imagery. For Talbott, “eschatological punishment” is purifying rather than retributive. The fire burns away what cannot stand in love’s presence; what remains is the soul, finally able to receive what was always offered. Andrew Hronich’s Once Loved, Always Loved (Wipf and Stock, 2023), Chapters 5 and 6, brings the conditional-immortality and purifying-fire readings into recent comprehensive engagement, and Gregory MacDonald’s The Evangelical Universalist (Cascade, 2nd ed., 2012), Chapter 6, treats postmortem opportunity within a confidently universalist reading.12 William Harrison surveys the duration question through careful word studies of aiōn and aiōnios — terms English Bibles routinely render “eternal” but which, on Harrison’s reading, often do not in fact name unbounded duration.13
What I want to underline is that distressing NDEs are compatible with each of these readings. The reader does not have to choose between “the experience is real and confirms eternal hell” and “the experience is not real and is some artifact of the dying brain.” That false binary has driven much bad theology. The experience is real. Its meaning is more open than either side’s talking points suggest.
My own reading combines Manis’s phenomenology with the conditional-immortality + postmortem-opportunity framework I have argued at length elsewhere.14 Distressing NDEs are real. They are sometimes redemptive, as Storm’s case shows. They are sometimes a glimpse of the trajectory of a soul persisting in rejection. They are not, by themselves, evidence that anyone’s final destiny is fixed at the moment we have the data for. The encounter with Christ is genuinely offered. Some respond. Some refuse. Some will go on responding through the intermediate state and at the final judgment (the postmortem opportunity argument). Those who finally refuse, after the full encounter and full knowledge, will eventually cease to exist (CI). I remain genuinely open to the universalist reading that even those who finally refuse will at last be drawn home; I do not consider that question settled in either direction by the empirical data.
What I am confident of is this. Distressing NDEs do not require strict eternal conscious torment. They are consistent with the divine-presence framework, with restorative-justice readings, with purifying-fire readings, and with the CI + PO position I hold. The reader who needs eternal conscious torment to make sense of these cases is asking the cases to do work they cannot do.
I would not be honest if I did not raise one further possibility. The Christian tradition has held, on the authority of Scripture, that not all spiritual experiences come from God. The discernment of spirits is a real practice with real biblical warrant (1 John 4:1; 1 Thessalonians 5:21). The full development of NDE discernment is the work of Chapter 30. For the present chapter the question is whether some distressing NDEs are demonic deceptions.
I think the answer is: rarely, and we should be cautious. The cumulative pattern of NDE phenomenology — peaceful and distressing alike — is consistent with biblical anthropology and frequently leads to repentance and conversion. A wholesale demonic-deception reading flounders against the rescue pattern. It is hard to see how a deception could end with the NDEr crying out to Christ and being delivered. That is not how deception works. That is how rescue works. There may be cases in which a distressing NDE is best read as an encounter with something other than God’s purifying presence; the discernment criteria of Chapter 30 apply. But the default reading is not deception.
NDErs who report distressing experiences carry a wound the rest of us do not always recognize. Many have hidden their experience for years, as Bush did. They have heard sermons that told them they got a glimpse of their final destiny and they are not sure they survived hearing it. Some have lost their faith because their pastor could not handle what they reported. Some have lost their pastor because the pastor handled it badly.
If you are companioning someone who has had a distressing NDE: take the experience seriously. Do not dismiss it. Do not weaponize it. Do not use it as a sermon illustration. Listen. Ask what it has done to them. Ask what they think it meant. Help them sit with the difference between what the experience felt like and what it might be saying. The experience is not necessarily a verdict. It may be a warning, a wake-up, a confrontation with a part of the self the soul cannot bear in light. It may also be one moment of a longer journey that does not end where the experience ended. Pray with them. Read the Christ-encounter passages with them. And remember that the most famous distressing NDE in the literature ended with Howard Storm calling on Jesus and being answered. That is the pattern of the gospel itself.
I have spent a long time in this material now. The temptation, as a researcher, is to grow numb to it. The temptation, as a Christian, is to organize it neatly into the categories of the doctrine I already hold. Both are wrong. The dark NDEs are real reports from real people about something that happened to them at the boundary of death, and they deserve neither numbness nor neat boxes.
What they show, when read with care, is that the encounter at the threshold of death is not a vague brightness that washes over everyone the same way. It is a meeting with Someone. The meeting is real. The response of the soul to the meeting is real. While some souls meet the encounter with peace and recognition, others meet it with terror and resistance. The terror is not yet the end. The resistance is not yet final. The encounter is, in the Christian tradition’s deepest reading and in the empirical pattern these cases reveal, an offer. The offer is Christ Himself.
For the Christian reader: the dark experiences do not require us to retreat into a doctrine of eternal conscious torment we never held, nor to abandon the seriousness of judgment we have always held. They invite us to a more careful, more biblical, more pastorally humane account of what happens when a soul that has not yet given itself to Christ is finally brought, in full, into His presence. The distressing NDEs do not break that account. They confirm it from the harder side. The next chapter looks at how the same encounter has been received across the world’s great religious traditions — and what that universality means for the Christian reading we have been developing.
↑ 1. Nancy Evans Bush has described her own 1962 experience in several venues, most fully in Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences (self-published, 2012), and in “Distressing Western Near-Death Experiences: Finding a Way through the Abyss,” in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation, ed. Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James (Praeger, 2009), 63–86. The details given here follow her published telling.
↑ 2. Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush, “Distressing Near-Death Experiences,” Psychiatry 55, no. 1 (February 1992): 95–110. The three-fold typology proposed in this paper — inverse, void, and hellish — has remained the standard framework in the field.
↑ 3. Nancy Evans Bush, Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences (self-published, 2012). Bush’s book remains the only sustained pastoral-theological treatment of distressing NDEs by someone who has had one. Her companion volume, The Buddha in Hell and Other Alarms (2016), develops the cross-cultural dimension. See also her long-running website Dancing Past the Dark.
↑ 4. Janice Miner Holden, “More Things in Heaven and Earth: A Response to ‘Near-Death Experiences with Hallucinatory Features,’” Journal of Near-Death Studies 26, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 33–42, discusses the difficulty of estimating prevalence in self-selected samples. Greyson, “The Incidence of Near-Death Experiences,” Medicine & Psychiatry 1 (1998): 92–99, treats incidence more generally.
↑ 5. The 15–23 percent range is reported in retrospective surveys. See Nancy Evans Bush and Bruce Greyson, “Distressing Near-Death Experiences: The Basics,” Missouri Medicine 111, no. 6 (November–December 2014): 486–91. Prospective studies (Sartori, van Lommel, Parnia AWARE I) have generally reported lower rates of distressing content, often well below ten percent, though comparison is complicated by differences in instrumentation and inclusion criteria.
↑ 6. Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life, with foreword by Anne Rice (Doubleday, 2005). The original self-published version appeared as My Descent into Death and the Message of Love Which Brought Me Back (Clairview, 2000). Storm’s account has been examined critically in the NDE literature; the dissertation discusses the case in its assessment of evangelical-engagement NDE accounts.
↑ 7. Maurice Rawlings, Beyond Death’s Door (Thomas Nelson, 1978). Rawlings’s methodology was poor — he interviewed patients immediately after resuscitation rather than using standardized protocols, and his theological framing colored his case selection — but the rescue pattern he described has been corroborated in better-documented later work. The author engages Rawlings critically; his data points exist, but they require careful handling.
↑ 8. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 2nd ed. (Cascade Books, 2014), Ch. 6 (“Eschatological Punishment”) and Ch. 13 (“Love’s Final Victory”). Talbott reads the New Testament punishment language as primarily corrective rather than retributive, drawing especially on the parallel structure of Romans 5–11.
↑ 9. The classic articulation of the conditional-immortality reading is Edward Fudge, The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment, 3rd ed. (Cascade, 2011). For the careful philosophical defense of a freely-chosen-hell view that I engage without endorsing, see Jerry L. Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (University of Notre Dame Press, 1992) and Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things That Matter Most (Brazos, 2015).
↑ 10. R. Zachary Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (Oxford University Press, 2019), esp. Part III, Chs. 7–8. Manis acknowledges the model’s patristic and Eastern Orthodox antecedents at length; key sources he draws on include David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea (Eerdmans, 2005), and Andrew Louth, “Eastern Orthodox Eschatology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (Oxford University Press, 2008). The literary kinship is C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (Geoffrey Bles, 1945).
↑ 11. Sharon L. Baker, Razing Hell: Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught About God’s Wrath and Judgment (Westminster John Knox, 2010), esp. Part 3 (Chs. 9–11) on the fire, the wicked, the redeemed, outer darkness, and the lake of fire. Baker explicitly denies that her position is universalism (p. 141), holding open the possibility that some persist in refusal and are finally annihilated.
↑ 12. Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved: A Logical, Biblical, and Theological Defense of Christian Universalism (Wipf and Stock, 2023), Chs. 5 (“Conditional Immortality”) and 6 (“Saved through Fire”); Gregory MacDonald [Robin A. Parry], The Evangelical Universalist, 2nd ed., foreword by Oliver D. Crisp (Cascade, 2012), Ch. 1 (“A Hell of a Problem”) and Ch. 6 (“To Hell and Back”).
↑ 13. William Harrison, Is Salvation Possible After Death? (self-published, 2019), Chs. 12–17 and esp. Ch. 19, “The Meaning of Aion and Aionios.” Harrison’s linguistic argument depends on a long-running scholarly debate over whether the Greek terms denote duration in the strict sense; Harrison joins Talbott, Heleen Keizer, Ramelli, and others in arguing that the standard rendering “eternal” often imports more than the Greek requires.
↑ 14. James Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity: A Biblical and Theological Assessment of Salvation After Death (IVP Academic, 2021), Chs. 9–10, gives the most careful articulation of the boundaries among CI, PO, and UR. The position I hold — CI with PO and openness to UR — is developed in my Beyond the Grave and Death Is Not the Deadline, where the eschatological argument runs at length; this book settles only the substance-dualist and conscious-intermediate-state questions, not the eschatological ones.